Wishing Upon a Star for Armageddon:

It's understandable for people opposed to the status-quo to hope for some sort of cataclysmic event which will either propel change before it happens or compel change afterwards. However, it's hardly laudable. Wishing for disasters that will destroy the world is a little super-villainy, no matter how you look at it. Even worse is when people invent disasters that aren't even there in order to achieve change. Most people don't do this through wholesale lying. They deceive themselves about the dangers ahead long before they spread their message to deceive others. Let's look at some of the 'disasters' ahead that people claim we must immediately act against and why the only disaster we have to fear, is fear of disasters itself.

1. Global Warming: I think the science of global warming is well established. CO2 is a greenhouse gas and it can have a sizable impact on the Earth's temperature. If the Earth had no atmosphere, for instance, it would be -20 degrees or so on average. CO2 will also have some effect on other greenhouse gasses like the amount of water vapor in the air, the amount of methane in the air, and so on. It will also melt high-albedo white ice and snow areas and turn them into lower albedo black patches which will warm that local area, if not the entire globe, much more. We can assume that so long as we continue to throw up more CO2 into the air, the hotter our planet will become.

Why this won't destroy the world: Currently the world is too cold. The cost for heating homes is higher than the cost for air conditioning them, as a world average. Most of the Earth's landmass is in high latitude areas like Russia and Canada, which could desperately use some more sunshine. As heat and CO2 increases, plants have longer growing seasons and higher growth rates. The total amount of rainfall increases in a hotter world, though the rain apparently comes in less timely intervals. However, modern civilization can easily trap the water when it comes and let it back out when nature isn't accommodating through aquifers, dams and reservoirs. Therefore simply having more rainfall to work with will always be a net plus. Rising sea levels can be accommodated by dikes like Holland already uses, or coastal areas can just be abandoned and people can rebuild elsewhere. Buildings have to be replaced every 50 years or so anyway, so it's no big deal if gradually rising sea levels require we replace all the coastal buildings on Earth within the next 100 years. There are several ways of lowering the Earth's temperature including carbon capture, throwing aerosols into the air, or just painting stuff white. But there are very few ways to heat the world (other than throw out the very same CO2 we're using now.) It is better to be on the hot end than the cold end of the spectrum. None of the disaster scenarios of global warming, the 'if we do nothing' type disasters, are really a big deal when looked at closely. At the end people are left scratching their heads as to why anyone should care. The disaster of suddenly abandoning our cheapest source of energy without having any other infrastructure or production in place, however, really would be the end of the world. Draconian taxes or carbon caps would make the cost of living much higher and it would hurt the poor the most. The third world would be locked in a strait jacket of poverty with energy prices too high to afford basic human rights like heating, air conditioning, clean water (which must be treated by power plants), cooking stoves (many third worlders still rely on burning wood or dung to cook, an inefficient and unhealthy lifestyle), night-time lighting, and just a normal life that the West has taken for granted for the last century.

All the more frustrating is the fact that if the environmentalists would just hold off another twenty years, clean energy like wind and solar will become cheaper than fossil fuels anyway. At that point the market will swiftly and efficiently make the transition from one fuel type to the other, for the sake of saving money instead of costing us anything. There are so many daily advances in solar, wind, biofuels, and electric vehicles that the future -- so long as the economy doesn't collapse due to excessive carbon taxes or energy prices! -- has already provided a painless cure to whatever harm global warming would have done if left unchecked.

2. Peak oil: Alternatively, there is a crowd that believes the economy can never wean itself off fossil fuels and that the moment we run out of oil the world is coming to an end. These people usually call for various solutions like reducing the world's population to a few million ahead of time or maybe just investing in various 'short' stocks that will make them a tidy few million as the world's lights go out.

First off, there is plenty of oil left in the world. Iraq's oil supplies have barely been touched due to the 30 years or so of conflict in that region, and it has as much oil as Saudi Arabia. Russia has plenty of oil as well, which communism's inherent inefficiencies were unable to tap. The deep sea remains unexplored, and so does Alaska. Shale oil hasn't even been touched. But that's not the real issue. The real issue is why people think oil is the only fuel in town. Cars can be made to run on biofuels, just like Brazil's cars do today. The Nazi's during WWII, losing access to all oil fields, switched to synthetic gasoline created out of coal. And there's still hundreds of years left of coal in the ground. Electric vehicles are coming out even as we speak and will be fueled through coal, nuclear, solar, wind, or natural gas long after oil runs out. Basically, the idea that energy isn't fungible is ridiculous. There is no way we can talk about 'peak energy' because the sun isn't dying anytime soon. As our science progresses and we learn how to tap more and more of the sun's power, it would take quite a lot of overpopulation to overwhelm as providential a provider as Apollo.

Nor will switching away from oil cost us anything in higher energy prices. By the time oil runs low, all other energy technologies will have double, trebled, become 10 times cheaper as they are today. It's the inexorable march of progress. Just recently new techniques have made natural gas far cheaper than it used to be. The same will occur for all other power sources. Energy in the future won't cost more than $2 a gallon, and cars will go much further per gallon anyway. Oil's just no big deal.

3. Peak Fresh Water: The concept of peak fresh water is just as silly. Yes it's true that population growth puts pressure on our fresh water resources. Yes it's also true that the places with highest population growth often have the least access to water. I have no idea why the idiots of Yemen are having six kids a piece when they're living in a lifeless desert. But aside from local eco-disasters like Yemen, it's impossible that the world will run out of water. This is because water is recycled through a natural cycle via the sun. No matter how much we use, it comes back to us, good as new, a couple months later. The ISS is showing right now that people who drink water don't actually 'destroy' it. It's just purified and fed back into the system. The sun does the same thing on a grand scale as our technology does in space. Furthermore, in areas where there isn't enough fresh water, there is still plenty of salt water available. As energy prices come down through access to more and more energy producing technology, and as water desalination methods are developed to be ever cheaper, it will become easy for countries to convert salt water to fresh water and drink all they like. Simply switching to drip irrigation like the Israelis use would save tons of water all around the world. If water ever did become rare, conservation methods such as drip irrigation would become the norm and the crisis would go away again.

4. Peak Phosphorous: It's true that at current rates we'll run out of phosphorous, a necessary ingredient in fertilizer, in a hundred years. However, phosphorous isn't destroyed when eaten -- it just goes into our sewage a bit later. The simple solution to phosphorous depletion is to recycle our natural waste before letting it disappear into the ocean. This will cost some amount in infrastructure and some more in energy, but again energy will be one resource so ubiquitous that it simply will not be a problem ever again. Once we master solar power energy will be the one thing we never lack in this world. We could also be much less wasteful of our fertilizer from the beginning and still produce the same crop yields. Or we could find various genetically engineered crops that grow well with less fertilizer and slow our depletion of the phosphorous we already have. Overpopulation does create a strain on a whole lot of resources we take for granted, like water, fertilizer, and metals, but recycling is the solution for all these things. Our landfills have enough metal to fuel the world economy for lord knows how long. Due to the abundance of resources, humans have been eating the buffalo tongue and leaving behind the buffalo. All overpopulation will make us do is eat the rest of the buffalo. Which in my mind is the moral thing to do anyway.

5. Dysgenics: It's true that dumb people are rapidly out-reproducing smart people. It's also true that smart people have below-replacement fertility. This means the world is becoming dumber every day, and that eventually smart people would die out entirely. However, there are countervailing trends that mute these issues, if not make them moot.

For one, there is the flynn effect, which can't really be explained, but in any event has made everyone 15 IQ points smarter over this last century. It will take a heck of a lot of dysgenics to wear down that enormous IQ boost we magically received. For another, there are still plenty of ways to increase children's IQ's around the world. Better educations can stimulate their brains to be more active and challenged in their early years. This has been shown to give a permanent IQ boost of 15 points as well. Many people around the world still receive spotty to no education, and their IQ is needlessly depressed thereby. Better childcare can also raise IQ's. If children are left in a dark room alone all day, their IQ's will be drastically reduced. If surrounded by other kids in daycare, or cuddled by a loving mother, these issues disappear. Better nutrition can also improve IQs, and there are still large portions of the world where children are malnourished. Lastly, encouraging mothers to breast feed their children, not drink while pregnant, not smoke while pregnant, not take drugs while pregnant, and screening their children for down's syndrome, can eliminate a whole host of IQ depressing forces.

Suppose all efforts to improve children's environments have been taken and yet dysgenics is still overtaking the world. For one group of people, this won't be an issue. The children of intelligent parents, however few, will be smarter than ever. For instance, firstborn children tend to be a few IQ points smarter than all additional children. The fact that high IQ parents tend to only have 1 or 2 kids, therefore, gives an immediate advantage to said kids. Furthermore, the bell curve showed that assortative mating has reached a new high in America. That is, people rarely marry outside their IQ range anymore. When in the past people married by pedigree, or by looks, or by geographic proximity, people today marry by education levels and incomes, both of which correlate to IQ. Smart people are finding each other, sometimes across thousands of miles, and don't have to compromise until they find the very best. The results will be extremely bright children even in a world that's gradually getting dumber. These extremely bright children, in turn, will produce the scientific advances we need to find the genes for intelligence, and then it will simply be a matter of splicing them into every newborn to solve the problem forever. Since these extremely bright children will be around for centuries to man our science institutes and colleges, I just don't see how the problem of intelligence will remain unsolved. We've already sequenced the human genome, after all. As prices of genome sequencing go down, we'll soon be able to sequence the genome of every single human alive. With that kind of data, even the smallest of statistically significant genetic variations will be able to pinpoint what genes are contributing to intelligence. The answers will come.

6. The Global Caliphate: It is true that Islam has become 1/4 of the world's population and continues to expand via conquest, colonization, and natural birth rates. It is also true that all Islamic countries underperform their genetic potential. It's also true that muslims tend to be people of low genetic potential in the first place. All of this is lamentable. But the idea that it's a threat that will destroy the world is again overblown. There are several reasons why.

For instance, when muslims immigrate to Europe or America, they don't maintain the high birth rates they had in their native lands. These birth rates tend to go down, approaching the norm of the Europeans around them. Second, birth rates even within muslim territories have steadily been falling around the world. Third, Islam will not turn its back on the benefits of science and technology. Muslims will interpret their religion in such a way that the economy and progress will not be harmed, for their own sake. A muslim dominated France, for instance, may require women dress more modestly and chop off the hands of thieves (And why complain about that?), but it won't shut down the stock market or ban fossil fuels. Actually, muslims are probably less insane than the people who met at the Copenhagen conference a few months ago. Ultimately, all religions are going to fall before the scythe of secularism. Atheism has never been more popular or accepted on Earth. Christianity is a hollowed out shell in Europe, and the same acidic forces of secularism will destroy Islam in Europe too. But even assuming Islam conquers India, Africa and Europe, it has little foothold in America or China, either of whom could smash it at a moment's notice. The most intelligent people tend to be the rulers of any society, and intelligent people are mostly atheists or agnostics. The same would be true of Islamic rulers, most of whom probably don't believe a damned word of the Koran but only give a flimsy show of support to appease the dumb peasants beneath them. Ultimately, a 1500 year old fairy tale from a desert will not be able to control the forces of modernity already unleashed upon the Islamic world. No one will stand for it when they see the benefits of peace, prosperity, and freedom laid before them. If Islam can have a few conservative effects on modernity, like containing women's sexuality or improving the birth rate, it would be a good thing.

Previously, 1/4 of the world was communist and look what happened to it. Failing models that can't produce material wealth will fail. The people will abandon them and seek out models that work. The anti-scientific desert jihadi Islam is doomed to fail because it cannot produce a high standard of living for its adherents. Some moderated form of Islam might survive, but it's hard to say such a religion would even be a bad thing for its believers.

7. Debt Will Destroy the World: It's true that there's never been more debt on Earth than today. That there are staggering levels of debt, in the hundreds of trillions, that threaten the entire developed economy. It's practically certain that the world will default on most of these debts. But no one has explained what the practical ramifications of these debt defaults will bring. Most debt on Earth is owed to people's retirement accounts. Government bonds, for instance, or promised social security or national health care payments for our elderly. This whole problem wouldn't have arisen if not for a rising length of life that caught the world off guard. Since old people keep refusing to die at a reasonable age, governments are going to have to offer less and less to old people to keep the budget balanced. I don't see how old people have much to complain about, given their alternative. So what if governments refuse to pay benefits to old people or pay for the treasury bonds that fueled their retirement funds. Old people can just stop lazing about and get back to work, or they can all do us a favor and die already. The end of the world doesn't come from old people not getting their gold-plated golden years, it comes from children not being born and cared for. That's where the future lies, that's where humanity needs to give its focus. Old people do not have the right to graduate from mankind to vampires and suck the rest of us dry for every dollar we make just because they're old. So we will default on our debts, set the record straight on our over-prioritization towards senior care, and then get back to the normal business of creating wealth. Since a massive debt default doesn't actually destroy a single acre of farmland, a single car factory, or any other actual source of wealth, we will simply be atlas shrugging a pile of paper. The very next day, people can go back to work with light hearts and a tax burden 1/2 as high as before. The sooner people wake up and realize debt defaults when it comes to promises to elderly people do not jeopardize other debt defaults like refusing to pay for iron ore shipments or finishing a planned road in the middle of a city, the sooner our stock markets can stop panicking and go back to business as usual. There is no reason to conflate the two issues.

8. Racial Holy War: The idea that at some point, everyone's going to suddenly pick up a machete and start hacking at their neighbors, which will usher in a global cataclysm, is also fantasy. For one thing, people have become less violent than at any time in the past. This is the most peaceful era in world history. Few things can be won through violence anymore, whether it be money, women, or power. Everything is turning digital and your brain is your only real resource. It's hard to 'loot' people's IQ or job training (except through peaceful taxation). Most wars were fought for economic reasons in the past, and that cost/benefit ratio is simply dead. As far as going to war for cultural reasons, there are many barriers to this as well. For one thing, most people are atomized individuals and do not have any organizations they could rally around. Second, almost everyone is friends or family with someone from the other side, and would be averse to hurting them. Third, no matter how irritating someone is, war and economic collapse would be worse than simply enduring the nuisance. The more technological and population dense a society becomes, the more fragile it becomes, the more costly war is to its people. No one wants to disrupt their peaceful and TV full days with a war that leaves them without any supply of food for a hundred miles in any direction. Fourth, the prevailing culture is the celebration of tolerance and diversity, which is very effective in leaving people uninterested in fighting wars over our differences. Most people have a live and let live attitude, and the schools and media reinforce this pacifist attitude every day. If there is one product of modern liberalism, no one can deny how incredibly peaceful the world is, both internally and externally. Not even 1% of Americans die by murder.

If diversity ever does cause a country to split up, it will be along the same model as the USSR, Kosovo, East Timor, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. Maybe a little violence, but not much, and ultimately a peaceful, bilateral agreement to split and be done with it. Peaceful diversity dis-unification can and has been done many times. If the issue ever gets too much for people to bear, expect it to be handled via a referendum, just like Quebec.

9. Divorce will Destroy the World: As nice as it is to have a mother and a father, we've already carried out an uncontrolled experiment of hundreds of millions of illegitimate kids with no fathers. The results are not cataclysmic. It's often hard to even show what is the consequence of being a fatherless bastard, and what is just due to your crappy genes you would have had either way. But even with crappy genes and no father, most people find employment and make a sufficient income to live by. Most people don't do crime. Most people don't commit suicide. Most people, in the end, just endure the pain and walk forward.

Humans are surprisingly resilient life forms. No matter how harsh the situation you throw them in, whether it's a ghetto or a gulag, people still come out the other side alive, even intact and cheerful. People adjust to the world they live in and call it happiness. It's certainly cruel to rely on people's power of endurance, but it's also silly to not accept that it exists. Especially when we come from a history of hardship far greater than anything today -- lifespans of average 30 years, 100 year's wars, grinding poverty that leaves you feet shorter than children are today, no clean water to drink from, no literacy, no vaccines, no clothes. People went through all of that and we're still here, so how exactly is divorce going to make a difference?

10. SOCIALISM!: Right wingers are warning about the dangers of socialism every day, but all they can point to is ludicrously small government programs like HUD or food stamps. Social security and medicare were taxes that people paid to their future selves, and that issue is separate from socialism and has a lot more to do with ageism. The other largest expense in government is the military, which no one can explain why we need anymore. Who exactly is threatening to invade our borders and burn down the white house? And how hypocritical is it to even provide for a common defense when we don't defend our borders anyway and welcome all the illegals who do arrive? It's true that there's a thoroughly documented link between economic freedom and per capita GDP. At the same time, people can get by on less economic freedom and keep high GDP's by just happening to have an oil well or two nearby, or some good tourist beaches to relax upon. Which just goes to show how minor economic freedom as a factor must be, that a constant can overcome a multiplier. Many, indeed most people, are willing to sacrifice cut-throat capitalism and all its economic joys for a little more security and a little more equality. No one is willing to sacrifice all economic prosperity for complete security or complete equality. Communism failed and no one's interested in trying to repeat it.

As far as nationalized health care goes, most health care happens before you ever enter a hospital. A healthy country that provides clean water, clean air, and good food to its people will never have high health costs to speak of. Nationalized health care may be wasteful, it may be costly, it may be hard on old people by rationing services, but ultimately it can't affect the hundreds of millions of younger people who never see doctors for decades at a time. Health care is practically worthless in the first place, so whether it's nationalized or not makes no difference to how much wealth there is in the world. I'd be far more worried if computers were socialized, and who's calling for that? Arguably, government crackdowns on smoking have saved more lives than any amount of capitalist free markets ever have. Preventing smoking via government force has lowered health care costs, and mortality, far more than anything capitalism can do. If nationalized health care came alongside a ban on smoking that alone would offset all the advantages of private care, whatever they may be.

I'm sure there are more collapse models orbiting the internet. Maybe God will come down and smite us sinners for ignoring his old books. Maybe a solar storm will fry all electronics and plunge us into a new dark age. Maybe a nuclear war will break out and throw us into a nuclear winter that results in half the world dying of starvation. But there's no evidence any of these risks are likely or imminent. Basically, the future is going to look a lot like the present. Things may slowly get worse, or they may slowly get better. Or they might slowly get worse in some ways and slowly get better in other ways. But swift, sudden, dramatic collapses, the kinds of things alarmists are wishing upon a star, have no feasible route to coming true. A little bit of ridicule is in order for all of the imbibers of disaster porn. And a little bit of realism needs to be injected back into the debates of people who have been convincing each other, in an ever-ascending escape from reality, about all the things that are 'bound to happen,' and 'soon,' just like Jesus kept saying when he was around. Nothing is bound to happen, and nothing EVER happens soon.